In an apt follow on to our stories about gaming on Haiku last week, Quake III, the recently open-sourced shoot-'em-up, has been ported to BeOS. Ported by Jens Kalmark, the game requires the original Quake III level files - as is the same with the BeOS ports of Quake I and II - and as it is in its preliminiary release, has some limitations. As taken from the readme file:

-Sound skips and is generally weird.

-The Quake3 virtual machine crashes under BeOS.
This release has been modified to always fall back
to interpreter mode. This is slower.

-Fullscreen mode is not implemented.

-Connecting to punkbuster servers will probably not
work as punkbuster was not open sourced.

-Build with 'make debug' or 'make release'
You'll also need nasm for building.

-Typing inside the game will sometimes not work
You can change your name in q3config.cfg
(/boot/home/.q3a/whatever...)


Quake III was ported to BeOS many, many years ago by id themselves, and was publically demonstrated by Be, however, relying on BONE and the OpenGL beta kits that were never publically released, it was never placed on sale. However, you can now use your Windows or Mac or Linux version CD to play the game, albeit many years later ;)

Whether this is using OpenGL or native graphics I don't know - I don't have the game to try with right now, but I'm going to drop a mail to the porter to find out.

Update

After receiving a mail back from the porter. The port uses OpenGL, and works with Rudolf's drivers; and apparently is only really of a usable speed with these. It also requires BONE, and most interestingly, the screenshots show it running on Haiku. Haiku doesn't support Rudolf's hardware-3D efforts as yet, so software 3D is in use, but its still running.